Sorry, it’s not about Lineker’s job or BBC but about the boat child
Last week, Gary Lineker, once a wealthy professional UK footballer and now a wealthier BBC host of the Match of the Day, tweeted in response to UK home secretary Suella Braverman’s bill against illegal immigration: “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?” Lineker was fired by the BBC, anticipating displeasure from the Tory government. Unlike a desperate country like India, many of Lineker’s BBC colleagues have walked out in support. Partly as a result, he’s reported to be back.
The BBC likes to describe itself as fearless, impartial and holding power to account. The power here is Braverman, a Buddhist incidentally, whose compassion is often indistinguishable from cruelty. Last week, she said of illegal immigrants: “They will not stop coming here until the world knows that if you enter Britain illegally you will be detained and swiftly removed.” In defence of her immigration policy, she explained that it was finally meant for the well-being of the people fleeing their lands of birth. It is a bit like the assassin asking the victim where he should be shot.
Many progressive UK celebrities, rich, white, and awash in good sentiments, have supported Lineker. So, is Liberal Britain really for friendlier immigration laws, or are they just bothered about the language used? The language, naturally. Because, if one removed the comparison that Lineker made with Nazi Germany and which offended the government, would the boat people be welcomed with roses by Liberal Britain?
No. A recent Financial Times report quotes the YouGov/Global Progress survey, which says 58% of respondents found it “very important” to have “clear, consistently applied rules about who can come to our country”. And 44% said “limiting numbers” was “very important”. It is another way of saying that the relatively Liberal 58% agrees with the stringent 48%, provided the pills are sugar-coated. The truth is no one wants a poor and scruffy black, brown, or yellow stranger dripping the salt of the sea they crossed stumbling along the clean streets of a rich European country.
Rich because they once colonised the black, brown, or yellow lands. As I said, Liberal Britain is fundamentally in agreement with Conservative Britain. Their problem is not the plight of the immigrant. It is the BBC. Or free speech. Whose star exponent for the day is Lineker—worth about 29 million pounds. We are talking about a rich man’s rights in a rich country, not about a poor man at sea.
Suella Braverman’s main point is that illegal immigrants are straining the system to the tune of billions of pounds. Immigrant hopefuls to Britain come mostly from Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Afghanistan—places with a British geopolitical or strategic interest. More problematic are illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, is special in that Britain recently entered into an agreement with that country’s government to pay them to take back the deported asylum seekers. According to reports, some 28,000 potential immigrants crossed the channel to England last year, among them many Rwandans. In the early 90s, when lakhs died in the civil war in Rwanda, two beers could get you one grenade, a western diplomat said. The whites, some of whom no doubt own grenade companies, made a fortune. (You can’t keep a white man from money. It is in his blood. As is free speech. One feeds the other, perhaps.)
The immigration policy debate in Britain and the pale, painless version of the idea of free speech have now become inseparable from Lineker’s BBC job—which he can easily do without. How does a very rich man’s—even if he is a good soul—right to tweet overshadow the terror and trauma of, say, a boat child’s experience?
The same culture of vanilla goodness flavours, for instance, another western Liberal obsession: global warming. The West has moved into the post-rich phase where development ethics can be clinically discussed. All the coal has already been carried to Newcastle, and they are now free to move on to the virtues of non-carbon emitting technologies. Poor countries like India will take decades to get anywhere near western standards of living. But the earth-hugging, polar bear-loving West would like the rest of the imperfect world to cut carbon emissions, go for cleaner and more expensive development models, and put up with the poverty and social unrest resulting from the fraught transition.
It’s not just the hollowness of the BBC as free speech champions (home or abroad, everyone finally works for the Boss, whoever he, she, or it is), or the puffery of the perfumed Liberals that the immigration debate in Britain exposes. It also brings to the fore the historical obligation that former colonial powers Britain, France, or Belgium have toward their former colonies—and their unwillingness to meet it.
This is not just a subject for the Oxford Union debates or panel discussions in literature festivals, where everyone talks about reparations (which, if at all, will go to the respective government in power, not necessarily to the people) to loud applause. It demands nothing less than an opening of the borders across the developed and developing world: if capital is almost border-free, there is no reason why labour cannot be.
The present UK debate on the boat people is increasingly an extension of the old discourse of superficies. It is not Lineker’s access to free speech that is in question: his life is not in threat, he faces no uncertain future. It is not the exposure of the BBC’s hapless self. It is about the rights of the once-colonised poor to create muddy pools of seawater on the white shores of Albion. Albions everywhere.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B